In this paper I review my experience as Charles Wagley's Ph.D. student and later as a faculty colleague at the University of Indiana. In addition to his deep humanism and personal warmth, Wagley also had an uncanny ability to foresee important emerging issues in social sciences, especially within Latin American and Brazilian Studies. With his flexible, personable style he found ways to direct students and colleagues towards the issues he considered important, and which later became truly major issues for these fields. For example, he helped to create the interdisciplinary field of Latin American Studies while in New York, focused on Latin American race relations while at Columbia University, and created the Amazonian Studies program at University of Florida with its focus on impacts of development and infrastructure projects. He helped create scholarship programs for such studies through the Title VI mechanism. Through all of his scholarly contributions, Wagley led by inspiring with a rare social consciousness and a deep concern for the human costs of social and economic change